Redditor proposes genius idea for ‘alternative’ Melbourne Cup

It’s known as “the race that stops Australia”, but it has its fair share of detractors.

The Melbourne Cup has attracted some controversy over the years and following this year’s event one Redditor took to r/Melbourne to voice his complaints.

In a post titled F*** Cup Day, user circle_square_leaf denounced the Cup for abusing animals, promoting gambling and drinking, dividing the rich and poor, and making people wear silly hats.

circle_square_leaf can’t be alone in their opinion because the post skyrocketed to the top of the subreddit with over 3000 upvotes and 800 plus comments.

On Reddit, the story is often in the comments and in this case, the top comment is an absolutely genius proposal for an alternative Melbourne Cup.

“All I’m saying on the matter is, if you replace the horses with racing drones that can shoot each other out of the sky with lasers, everybody wins,” wrote user twoverend.

After the comment blew up, twoverend later returned to add some additional suggestions, including moving the event to a night-time slot (will look cooler), adding a huge free-for-all fight at the end (exciting) and rigging the drones to explode when they touch the ground (boom!).

“Also, anyone caught selling bottles of Yellow for $25 should be submerged up to their mouth in the Maribyrnong River for 48 hours,” twoverend added, clearly drunk with power at this point.

The drone idea was met with resounding approval from fellow users. Some other ideas that popped up were to give the jockeys oBikes instead of horses or just have people run while wearing silly hats. But nothing beat the drones.

Sadly, I don’t like the odds of this frankly brilliant idea becoming a reality.

But congrats twoverend, you win Aussie Reddit today fella.

About the author

Stefan is an Adelaide-based freelance writer. In his spare time, he plays tennis badly, collects vinyl and brushes up on his Mandarin. Follow Stefan on Twitter